LiveReload’s Web Developer Wonderland is a Mac OS X tool for web development that watches your files for when they change (when you save them) and automatically reloads the browser. But even better, it supports a bunch of common build tools (CoffeeScript, SASS, LESS, etc.) and runs them automatically to produce the browser-usable output automatically. To do better, it’d need to support arbitrary build logic, and hope that such logic is reasonably fast. But it’s a great idea for the 90%.

All of the Google+ feature releases today are cool, but I’m especially excited about the potential of G+ for Google Apps. I’m not sure this is obvious from the title, so don’t miss the post about it on the Google Enterprise blog. It’s G+ for a company’s employees or a school’s students and faculty, just like Gmail and Docs. Share domain-private information safely, and keep your domain identity separate from your personal identity.

The three major manufacturers of film-based motion picture cameras have all ceased production of them in the last year, in favor of digital. I’ve never held a film movie camera, but I’d like to think I would have enjoyed it.

Dear makers of browser video playback widgets other than YouTube: You ever notice how when a YouTube player is configured for auto-play, the video doesn’t start playing until the user gives that window focus? Do that.

Apple's homepage is perfect right now. But this is what we should remember most from Steve Jobs, I think — from his immensely powerful commencement speech at Stanford a few years ago:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

From the earliest days of Google, whenever Larry and I sought inspiration for vision and leadership, we needed to look no farther than Cupertino. Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product (including the macbook I am writing this on right now). And I have witnessed it in person the few times we have met.

On behalf of all of us at Google and more broadly in technology, you will be missed very much. My condolences to family, friends, and colleagues at Apple.

+Brett Terpstra loves writing text files, building tools to solve his own problems, and releasing those tools publicly. His latest— and I mean his latest for the next few hours after which something else will be his latest— is QuickQuestion, a process-and-toolset for maintaining a personal knowledge database of text files. A key insight here is that the user writes each knowledge nugget with a title in the form of a question, specifically the question that the user believes she would ask in the future to retrieve this answer. It’s a form of personal tagging (and QQ has search-based faceted tagging as well) that makes a ton of sense for a knowledge base, and I can’t wait to try it, whether or not I use Brett’s tool to organize it.

There’s potential to layer in narrative and shallow hierarchical organization into this system using the “FAQ” document format. FAQs are simply great: easy to write, easy to read, easy to rewrite. The narrative aspect is essential: an answer is allowed to defer detail to later questions, keeping each answer short and at an appropriate level of detail. The reader can navigate levels of detail by following the headings/questions down the page, and stop where they’re likely to find their answer. Not all of my technical writing ends up as a FAQ, but it all starts out like one.

QQ uses Mac’s Spotlight (mdfind) as its search engine, and so it Mac-only. But it’s seriously command-line driven, including a shell tool and LaunchBar and Alfred extensions.